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Stop Trying to “Protect” Women by Banning Trans Athletes
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On Saturday, the San Jose State University women’s volleyball team, the Spartans, lost the championship game to the Colorado State Rams. The season was plagued with controversy after a Spartan player was outed as transgender back in April and the team’s co-captain joined a lawsuit against the NCAA complaining that trans women in sports violates title IX.
Sigh. Here we go again. The fight to exclude transgender women from the upper echelons of women’s sports has been raging all year (on Wednesday, the pro women’s golf organizations LPGA and USGA announced a policy that would exclude most trans players) and, frankly, it’s time to take a closer look at the sexist undercurrent of this tired debate.
Those supporting the bans claim they’re necessary because cisgender women can’t possibly be as athletic as trans women. “No woman’s ever gonna have that strength and power that they have,” the Spartan co-captain told Fox News. As the story gained national attention, even Donald Trump weighed in, claiming, “I never saw a ball hit so hard, hit the girl in the head.” (The ball bounced off her shoulder in a totally normal play, for the record.)
But despite what the typical soundbites from the usual suspects (right-wing pundits, transphobic athletes and [facepalm] JK Rowling) claim, female athletes are nowhere near as vulnerable or outmatched as these bans and lawsuits against transgender players would have us believe.
A slew of new scientific research suggests that the lines separating athletes by gender are more fluid than we thought. And sure, male athletes do still hold the records in most sports. But as women’s achievements continue to grow, it’s becoming obvious we don’t need to be mollycoddled and protected by paternalistic sporting organizations and misguided activists.
I’m a former figure skater (no, I never made it to the Olympics), and over the years, I’ve always had at least one eye on sports. But even casual observers have noticed that college and pro-level female athletes are breaking records, getting faster, stronger, and more exciting to watch. We’ve seen the (reliably shocked) headlines touting female athletes who hit faster tennis serves, kick more powerful soccer penalties, and swim quicker times than some of the world’s best men. Just this week, a woman was signed to the previously all-male pro-baseball team the Toronto Maple Leafs, the first in the league’s history.
For centuries, people have assumed that the male physique was simply built to be better at sports. Accepted wisdom taught us that today’s men are descendants of the caveman hunter, evolved over millennia for superior endurance, strength, and power. Yet anthropologists have debunked this, and we now know that our female ancestors were hunting right alongside men, and research suggests that differences between male and female athletes may have less to do with biological advantage and more to do with quality of training.
Since the dawn of women’s sports, coaches have largely copy-pasted training techniques onto female athletes as if they were facsimile men. This isn’t the trainers’ fault. Knowledge of women’s biology lags well behind that of men. We don’t know what female bodies are capable of (case in point: While over 30 percent of exercise research studies are done using male-only participants, only 6 percent focused on females.) So it’s no wonder that when banning trans women, sports organizations do so with the excuse, “The science isn’t clear.” But science is playing catch-up on the study of women’s bodies—cis and trans—and what’s being found could upend our concept of “biological advantage.”
“When people are talking about the differences between females and males in terms of how they perform in different sports, some of that is related to just the records that have happened so far,” says Kathryn Ackerman, MD, MPH, director of the Wu Tsai Female Athlete Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and head physician at U.S. Rowing. “So we can talk about theoretical differences, but as women are given more resources, I think some of those gaps are going to narrow.”
So rather than protecting the safety or sanctity of women athletes, what if we consider the possibility that they’re as fierce—and as fiercely competitive—as men are? One place where we’ve seen how narrow the gaps can get: ultra-endurance sports. This basically means any event that lasts over six hours or takes place over 50 kilometers, and women have slowly but surely been gaining on men and defying expectations. In 2019, German cyclist Fiona Kolbinger didn’t just win a grueling cross-continental race—she finished a whopping 10 hours before the second place competitor. Earlier that year, the first female runner to win the 268-mile Montane Spine Race, Britain’s Jasmin Paris, did so while pumping breast milk at rest stops. She followed the example of Sophie Power, who completed the alpine Ultra-Trail Mont Blanc race in 2018 while breastfeeding her 3-month-old at rest stops (leading to one of the most badass photos I have ever seen).
While we’ve long known testosterone as the driver of physical strength, the effects of estrogen on athleticism are only now being studied. What we do know? It likely boosts coordination and motor skills and helps muscles recover faster after exertion. It may help athletes to store more energy and insulate against cold temperatures. This could explain why female swimmers outpace men by an average of around 12 percent in certain long-distance outdoor swimming races.
We’re also just starting to understand how menstruation affects athletic training and performance, with some successful women’s soccer teams tracking their cycles to train more effectively. In fact, contrary to popular belief, trans women athletes have been shown to actually have a physical disadvantage when competing against cis women athletes.
Many will still complain that it’s “unfair” for trans women to participate in women’s sports, but this ignores the reality of all athletics: There is no such thing as fair. Elite sports involve endless metrics tracked across decades-long careers. Athletes make dramatic training and lifestyle changes to achieve tiny gains in performance. Those trained by million dollar programs compete against people with no training budget or support. At 5'8", I probably can’t beat a rower who is 6'7"—male or female. At 4'8", Simone Biles—the literal GOAT—is never going to be drafted onto her husband’s NFL team. Some people were just built for certain sports (Michael Phelps is a natural-born swimmer and you’re never going to convince me otherwise).
At the heart of this issue are blurred lines that once seemed solid. But the truth is: They’ve always been fuzzy. In light of this, it would be easy—although lazy—to say, “Oh, well, let’s just get rid of all categories.” But categories exist to promote healthy, meaningful, and equitable competition. It would be no fun (not to mention morally repugnant) to watch a heavyweight champion demolish a lightweight athlete. But for me, which athletes belong to which categories should be more about sport and less about some notion of “real” womanhood.
As women, are we delicate or are we athletes? I argue we are the latter. And if a scrawny dude can pack on the pounds of muscle required to pull off a successful bid for the NFL, a trans woman who has followed all regulations to decrease any perceived advantages can play women’s volleyball. Or golf. Or snowshoe racing. As new research and training techniques allow women to reach new heights of sporting excellence, let’s compete with one another, and when it comes to bodies that may look or seem different, instead of protecting us, I say, “Bring it on.”
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